Rambling book reviews and identity politics

I finished listening to Professional Idiot by Steve-O. Kind of a heartwarming story of redemption. It’s real and crazy and honest and I think I like autobiographies better than biographies for this reason: they tend to have self-help elements. They include the why and the thought process and details you just can’t get from a writer who didn’t live it. Professional Idiot does have some tidbits of good advice, especially for anyone with extreme personality issues or struggling with drugs and alcohol. Highly recommend overall.
I should read more autobiographies.

I also listened to The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and that was also really good. Some of it really didn’t apply to me like the part about dating and commitment stuff. The way she thinks about relationships, which is the “normal” way of looking at them, is so foreign to me after having been polyamorous for so many years (gosh polyamorous wasn’t even in my spellchecker). But it also really got me thinking about how I already apply a lot of these ideas in my life after all these years of listening to self help books, but maybe didn’t express it the same way she does–I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, maybe that it felt like a kind of fun summary of so much I’ve learned from other self-help books from the perspective of this wacky, formerly uptight, soccer mom who feels like she maybe has a mimosa or two before heading to the recording studio. Anyway, I also very much recommend this one.

Now I am listening to Street Data Audiobook which I thought was going to be a new way of looking at our school systems but instead, now I’m only like an hour into it, but so far it’s all about race and gender, sexual orientation, stereotypical identity politics. But in the blurb it doesn’t mention anything about any of that stuff, just that it’s a new way to run schools. But so far it’s off-putting to me, like it’s painting our world as being this sinister hellhole where racism and discrimination is the determining factor in everything that happens. It’s heart is in the right place, don’t get me wrong. I just feel it could be counter-productive to actual long-term positive relations between races. It’s hard to describe, guess I can say I can visualize an extreme conservative version of me saying, “this is a bunch of woke ass bullshit and this is why I vote republican” and I can see a black teenage character reading this and thinking “this white lady thinks I need to be black. Like, for some reason she needs that to be my primary identity instead of letting me be an individual”.
So it got me thinking about cultural differences, but the small ones that are actually huge that books like this never talk about. I was thinking about how my parents didn’t believe in or use punishments of almost any kind and instead used a more science based communication approach, well, one of the consequences of this was a massive disconnect between me and the rest of the world. It was very difficult for me to make friends because I was so terrified of everyone else’s parents. School was a vicious war scape for me. Then on top of that being a boy who didn’t like sports, who thought differently, well I was a typical straight vanilla white boy, looked just like everyone else but couldn’t have been more different. In the real world, I think everyone has little differences like this and they make far more of a difference in our lives than the color of our skin.
I think what I’m trying to express is that attitudes like in the first hour of this book, I think serve to distance us from our individuality, it means well, but ultimately just dumps individual human beings each with wildly unique backstories and perspectives into these big bins of white black gay straight christian atheist etc etc.
So I wonder if this is what many conservatives are trying to express between the lines when they scream about “woke ass bullshit”.
“It’s really hard to stop being racist when you won’t stop screaming at us that we’re racist.” -some racist character I made up in my head whose trying to do the right thing but his instincts sometimes get the better of him.

I also kind of wanted to whine about something very similar, where we assume people’s life experiences based on their demographic instead of by listening to their individual stories and how it bothers me, as much as Black Lives Matter saved my life, don’t get me wrong. BLM helped me escape from years of trauma after my police brutality experiences, don’t get me wrong I’ll be forever grateful, but it’s frustrating because white people can be brutalized and traumatized by the police too. I’ve talked to many police brutality survivors and virtually all of them were white. Why can’t there be a police reform group that’s inclusive of white people? I’m sure there’s a few, but I never heard of em.
Why is such a huge organization actively excluding people like me who want desperately to help their cause, based on the color of our skin?
The entire issue around police violence is focused on race and it makes no sense. It seems it’s just this giant waste of energy, as though there’s some secret media empire training us all to divide along these ultimately meaningless lines like race, religion, and sexual orientation, instead of actually solving our problems.
All for a profit?
It’s up to us to choose a better way. Each of us as individuals in our everyday lives.

Oh I almost forgot to mention that by no means do I claim that systemic racism, white supremacy and white privilege do not exist. These things are very very real and I do see them, and a couple short documentaries come to mind: I forget the one but it was about housing discrimination and got into the specifics of how it all worked. I don’t remember the name, but there was another one, only like 15 minutes long made by MTV called Lynching Postcards, which I highly highly recommend if you can stomach it. It’s fucking brutal and it shows rather than tells which I think is a lot of our problem these days. We need to be telling more of our actual experiences, that’s what is going to actually show people that these things are real.

Like me for so many years when I would try to tell people that police brutality is real and then get all upset when they wouldn’t believe me but then I was too terrified to actually tell my stories. We’ve got to tell our stories. It’s one of the most freeing experiences and that’s what this country is supposed to be about, right? Freedom.
The key is to not wish for vengeance as you are telling them.

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